Dr. Dustin Jones // #GeriOnICE // www.ptonice.com In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, join Modern Management of the Older Adult division leader Dustin Jones discusses a framework to begin to better assess balance & tailor focused interventions for patients, including assessing risk factors, understanding inputs that affect balance, and how to measure outputs from balance. Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes, or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog. If you're looking to learn more about live courses designed to better serve older adults in physical therapy or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab. EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION INTRODUCTIONHey everyone, Alan here, Chief Operating Officer here at ICE. Before we get into today's episode, I'd like to introduce our sponsor, Jane, a clinic management software and EMR with a human touch. Whether you're switching your software or going paperless for the first time ever, the Jane team knows that the onboarding process can feel a little overwhelming. That's why with Jane, you don't just get software, you get a whole team. Including in every Jane subscription is their new award-winning customer support available by phone, email, or chat whenever you need it, even on Saturdays. You can also book a free account setup consultation to review your account and ensure that you feel confident about going live with your switch. And if you'd like some extra advice along the way, you can tap into a lovely community of practitioners, clinic owners, and front desk staff through Jane's community Facebook group. If you're interested in making the switch to Jane, head on over to jane.app.switch to book a one-on-one demo with a member of Jane's support team. Don't forget to mention code IcePT1MO at the time of sign up for a one month free grace period on your new Jane account. DUSTIN JONES Good morning, folks. You are listening to the PT on Ice daily show brought to you by the Institute of Clinical Excellence. My name is Dustin Jones, one of the lead faculty within the older adult division, and we are going to be talking about a framework for balance, about how we can think about balance from the assessment side of things. over to the intervention side as well. I feel like this area is very kind of misunderstood in the rehabilitation realm and it's often handled very poorly from what I've seen and I'm definitely guilty of this as well. Let's kind of play out the typical scenario when we're talking about trying to assess and improve people's balance, right? We have someone if you're an outpatient they likely came to you for you know some type of painful issue right back pain shoulder pain whatever and then you realize oh this person you know reports that they feel unsteady or that you may notice it yourself or you may have gotten a referral that said they've had a fall and we need to look at balance then we do our assessment and typically what we're doing is throwing some type of of you know quote-unquote balance outcome measure that we learned in school, probably something like the Berg, you know, balance test, where we take them through that test and we see a score and we say, oh my gosh, all right, you are at risk of a fall. I saw some deficits in some of these activities and man, all right, I'm gonna give you my balance program, right? So you've got your balance exercises. There's probably, you know, some tandem stance in there, semi-tandem, maybe one-legged stance if you're feeling funky, right? you're maybe doing some obstacle courses, maybe tossing a ball back and forth, you may be having to stand on an Airex foam pad, right? We kind of got this kind of generic balance program that does challenge people's balance capacities, but what we often see is that that generalized program is not specific to the deficits that that person provides. Balance, I would say out of any other facet of performance is probably one of the most complicated, because there's so many different variables that can influence someone's balance ability, and we need to identify those and then address those specifically, as opposed to giving these kind of generalized balance exercises, quote-unquote balance program, crossing our fingers and hoping that they actually make a significant difference in these people's lives. All right, so let's talk about a framework for assessment that's ultimately gonna lead to intervention. I think one of the big takeaways for many of us when we start to really look at people's balance abilities is we have to zoom out and look beyond their performance on outcome measures. We focus solely on that, and we ...
